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A newly discovered virus from the family that causes rabies may be responsible for three linked cases of hemorrhagic fever in the Democratic Republic of the Congo more than 3 years ago. Ebola virus, Marburg virus, Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, yellow fever, and dengue are well known viruses from four different viral families that can cause hemorrhagic fever. But an international team of researchers report in PLoS Pathogens today that the rhabdovirus family, which typically causes brain swelling or flulike disease, can join the club of hemorrhagic fever agents, which are among the most virulent pathogens known to humans....

A SARS-like Virus Has Been Detected In The Middle East Joshua BerlingerSeptember 24, 2012 Health experts are monitoring a SARS-like virus that has killed one individual and hospitalized another in the Middle East. The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that the 49-year-old Qatari man was admitted to an intensive care unit in Doha on September 7, suffering from "acute respiratory infection and kidney failure" after traveling to Saudi Arabia. He was transferred to Britain by air ambulance on September 11. The British Health Protection Agency also released a statement on Sunday addressing the infections. The WHO said virus...

This year is on track to be the worst on record for West Nile virus in the United States. As of 11 September, more than 2,600 new cases, including 118 deaths, had been reported from across the country to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. Symptoms of the mosquito-borne disease range from none (in most people) to life-threatening brain inflammation, and it can leave survivors with long-term disabilities including paralysis and fatigue. Researchers are now investigating suggestions that even mild infections may leave another lasting burden — kidney disease. “We are early in our...

For decades before antibiotics became generally available, sunshine was used to treat tuberculosis, with patients often being sent to Swiss clinics to soak up the sun's healing rays. Now, for the first time scientists have shown how and why heliotherapy might, indeed, have made a difference. A study led by researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, conducted in collaboration with the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research, has shown that high doses of vitamin D, given in addition to antibiotic treatment, appear to help patients with tuberculosis (TB) recover more quickly. The research, which will be published...

Analysis identifies target for immune response that could improve AIDS vaccines. HIV is finally revealing its weak spots to researchers, bringing an effective vaccine against AIDS closer to reality. A paper published in Nature today1 sheds light on how a vaccine can turn the immune system against the invading virus and so offer protection from infection. The results are also being presented at the AIDS Vaccine 2012 conference in Boston, Massachusetts, this week. The findings help to explain the results from a clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine that have puzzled researchers since they were published three years ago2. The...

Enlarge Image Digging in the dirt. Soil may be the source of some antibiotic resistance. Credit: Chris Price/iStockphoto A scoopful of soil, teeming with microscopic life, contains a rich library of genes that help bacteria thrive in the wild. Some of those genes, new research has found, are identical to those that allow disease-causing bacteria in humans to survive antibiotic treatment. The finding suggests that innocuous soil bacteria could be the original source of some antibiotic-resistant genes seen in hospitals. "Soil ecologists have been predicting for quite a while that the soil acts as a reservoir for resistance," says molecular...

Scientists of the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine have breathed new life into a forgotten technique and so succeeded in detecting resistant tuberculosis in circumstances where so far this was hardly feasible. Tuberculosis bacilli that have become resistant against our major antibiotics are a serious threat to world health. If we do not take efficient and fast action, 'multiresistant tuberculosis' may become a worldwide epidemic, wiping out all medical achievements of the last decades. A century ago tuberculosis was a lugubrious word, more terrifying than 'cancer' is today. And rightly so. Over the nineteenth and twentieth century it took a...

Results from a study conducted at Georgia State University suggest that a "fight" between bacteria normally living in the intestines and the immune system, kicked off by another type of bacteria, may be linked to two types of chronic disease. The study suggests that the "fight" continues after the instigator bacteria have been cleared by the body, according to Andrew Gewirtz, professor of biology at the GSU Center for Inflammation, Immunity and Infection. That fight can result in metabolic syndrome, an important factor in obesity, or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The results were published in the journal Cell Host &...

Third-trimester microbiota resembles that of people at risk of diabetes. Women's gut microbe populations change as pregnancy advances, becoming more like those of people who might develop diabetes. These changes, which do not seem to damage maternal health, correspond with increases in blood glucose and fat deposition thought to help a mother nourish her child. Although scientists have profiled microbial communities around the world and throughout the human body, this is the first time they have tracked the gut microbiome during pregnancy, says Ruth Ley, a microbiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who led the work1. Ley had...

Combination therapy is just one emerging weapon in the fight against tuberculosis. AIDS is infamous for its rampant rise in Africa. Yet the biggest killer of Africa’s HIV-positive population — tuberculosis (TB) — has a much lower profile. Its reach is global: it has appeared in pernicious new drug-resistant forms among addicts, prisoners and impoverished people worldwide. In the face of this deadly march, however, medicine has made little apparent progress. That is now set to change. Earlier this year, two companies filed for regulatory approval for drugs that should enhance existing TB therapies, and at the XIX International AIDS...

Posted: 10/11/2011; Future Microbiol. 2011;6(9):991-997. © 2011 Future Medicine Ltd. Abstract and Introduction Over the last decade Raman spectroscopy has become established as a physicochemical technique for the rapid identification of microbes. This powerful analytical method generates a spectroscopic fingerprint from the microbial sample, which provides quantitative and qualitative information that can be used to characterize, discriminate and identify microorganisms, in both bacteria slurry and at the single-cell level. Recent developments in Raman spectroscopy have dramatically increased in recent years due to the enhancement of the signal by techniques including tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy and due...

Enlarge Image At risk. Farmed chickens are dying from a recombined vaccine. Credit: NRCS/USDA Vaccines aren't supposed to cause disease. But that appears to be what's happening on Australian farms. Scientists have found that two virus strains used to vaccinate chickens there may have recombined to form a virus that is sickening and killing the animals. "This shows that recombination of such strains can happen and people need to think about it," says Glenn Browning, a veterinary microbiologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, in Australia and one of the co-authors on the paper. Chickens worldwide are susceptible to...

One genetic transformation turns friendly bacteria into assassins Glow-in-the-dark bacteria living in nematode worms flip a genetic switch to change from peaceful cohabitants into killers. The M-form (M for mutualism) of Photorhabdus luminescens bacteria make friendly colonies inside nematodes. But the microbes switch to the deadly toxin-producing P-form (P for pathogenic) when their hosts are ready to eat an insect from the inside out. Worms vomit up the bacteria into insects, and the bacterial toxins kill and help digest the feast...

A team of researchers led by UC Davis Health System has found that human alpha-defensin 6 (HD6) – a key component of the body's innate defense system – binds to microbial surfaces and forms "nanonets" that surround, entangle and disable microbes, preventing bacteria from attaching to or invading intestinal cells. The research describes an entirely new mechanism of action for defensins, an important group of molecules known to bolster the defenses of circulating white blood cells, protect cellular borders from invasive pathogens and regulate which "friendly" microbes can colonize body surfaces. The discovery provides important clues to inflammatory bowel diseases,...

The Virus that Inspired the Whole Zombie Genre Zombies have come to dominate pop culture — and the explanations for their origins range from dark magic to strange satellites. But the concept of zombies has been around for thousands of years — and it looks like the idea originally came from the world of epidemiology, not the world of legends. Biting, fear of light, speechlessness, and the intense aggression that most zombie movies display all come from a single source; rabies. Take a look at the original "rage virus." While some zombie movies go for the uncanny — emphasizing the...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — For as long as archivists at Rutgers University could remember, a small cardboard box marked with the letter W in black ink had sat unopened in a dusty corner of the special collections of the Alexander Library. Next to it were 60 sturdy archive boxes of papers, a legacy of the university’s most famous scientist: Selman A. Waksman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1952 for the discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic to cure tuberculosis. The 60 boxes contained details of how streptomycin was found — and also of the murky story behind it, a...

Both the WHO and the CDC say it's time to "sound the alarm" on the increase in drug-resistant gonorrheaFirst, it was the Centers for Disease Control—now, the World Health Organization is warning that Gonorrhea could join herpes and HIV/AIDS as "uncurable" sexually-transmitted diseases. "We're sitting on the edge of a worldwide crisis," says Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, of WHO's department of reproductive health and research. "There's a general complacency around sexually transmitted infections in general, and this doesn't have the same political or social pressure as HIV. That's because gonorrhea has been so easily curable so far, but in the future, that...

Cattle infected with a common parasite could be spreading TB across Britain undetected. Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) could be spreading across Britain because the most widely used test for the disease is ineffective when cattle are infected with a common liver parasite. The liver fluke Fasciola hepatica was already known to affect the standard skin test for bTB, but it was unclear whether the fluke stopped the disease developing or merely hid the symptoms. A study published today in Nature Communications suggests that the latter is more likely, and that the effect is significant. It estimates that around a third of...

Indian pharmaceutical firm Ranbaxy has launched the drug Synriam, which it claims will prove a more efficient and simpler treatment for malaria. It is the first recently developed antimalarial that is not based on artemisinin, one of the most effective treatments for malaria, which has begun to suffer from problems with resistance in recent years. Ranbaxy has hailed Synriam as India's first domestically developed drug - although none of its active ingredients were discovered in the country. Arterolane was discovered by a collaborative drug discovery project funded by the Medicines for Malaria Venture Ranbaxy developed Synriam as a fixed-dose combination...

Enlarge Image Hot spots. Three mutations in or near hemagglutinin's binding site (yellow) and one on its stalk increased transmissibility. Credit: H.-L. Yen and J. S. M. Peiros, Nature, Adavanced Online Edition, (2012) One of two influenza papers at the center of an intense, 6-month international debate has finally seen the light of day. Today, Nature published a controversial study in ferrets that shows how scientists can engineer an avian influenza strain to transmit between mammals through respiratory droplets such as those created by coughing or sneezing. The 11-page study, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin,...